2011 Top 20

Here is my official Top 20 film list of 2011 as submitted to Film Comment's annual Readers' Poll. I cheated with my number one choice by selecting a film I had already seen twice before, because I consider it the best film to premiere theatrically in New York last year, as well as representing my choice for best retrospective series of 2011, Edward Yang at the Walter Reade Theater. My runner-up retrospective would be Japanese Divas at Film Forum, which gave me a chance to see several great Mikio Naruse films again (including his masterpiece, Yearning). I also cheated with Skolimowski's Essential Killing, which I saw in January 2012 on Netflix streaming but which first played New York in 2011.

All the other films below I saw for the first time in 2011:

1. A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang)
2. The Turin Horse (Bela Tarr)
3. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
4. The Kid With a Bike (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
5. The Tree of Life (Terence Malick)
6. A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg)
7. Le Havre (Aki Kaurismaki)
8. Hugo (Martin Scorsese)
9. House of Pleasures (Bertrand Bonello)
10. Weekend (Andrew Haigh)
11. A Separation (Asgar Farhadi)
12. This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb)
13. Dreileben (Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf and Christoph Hochhausler)
14. The Day He Arrives (Hong Sang-Soo)
15. Terri (Azazel Jacobs)
16. Pina (Wim Wenders)
17. Essential Killing (Jerzy Skolimowski)
18. Young Adult (Jason Reitman)
19. Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan)
20. Tomboy (Celine Sciamma)

I also want to nominate the reopened Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens as the best New York movie venue of 2011.